Noon Electronic devices play integral roles in manufacturing, communication, healthcare, commerce, social interaction, and entertainment. For example, electronic devices power the server farms that provide cloud-based, distributed computing functionality for commerce and communication. Devices with computing power are also embedded in many different types of modern equipment, from medical devices to appliances and from vehicles to industrial tools. Further, one electronic device—the smartphone—has become a necessity to literally always have at hand.
Many electronic devices, such as those with a camera or a display screen, manipulate video data. For example, a video may be obtained using a security camera and then enhanced to improve some visual aspect, such as the clarity or contrast. Existing video data can also be manipulated to improve the appearance of individual video frames for presentation on a display screen of a smartphone or television monitor. For example, the video data of a movie may be processed to improve the realism of artificial graphics or to upscale the display resolution. Video image data is also manipulated in industrial and medical environments. For instance, the image data from a three-dimensional body scan can be stitched together into a video presentation for review and analysis by a doctor.
In any of these situations, the manipulation of video data is a processing-intensive task. This is due in part to the size or amount of information typically present in video data. Consequently, the area of an integrated circuit (IC) chip that is devoted to handling video data can be greater than that for other types of data. The difficulty of handling video data has been exacerbated by the ever-increasing display resolution of videos that electronic devices are expected to handle. For example, high-definition (HD) video has approximately four times more video data than standard-definition (SD) video, and ultra-HD (UHD) or 4K video has approximately four times more video data than HD video.
The amount of video data that electronic devices are expected to process has therefore increased dramatically over the last decade or so. Video data processing demands are expected to further increase in the coming years as virtual reality (VR) and artificial reality (AR) usage becomes more common. Accordingly, electronic device manufacturers continue to strive to improve the ability of electronic devices to handle ever-increasing amounts of video data.
This background description is provided to generally present the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, material described in this section is neither expressly nor impliedly admitted to be prior art to the present disclosure or the appended claims.